A very contrary September,wet Saturdays, sunny Sundays, hedgerows are now turning orange, leaves crisp and curl inwards, but a favourite of British gardens and urban walks still will be, as long as possible, the purple Buddlea. Struggling through the disappearing hours of daylight as Autumn makes its way, it allows us to savour the memories of its vibrant best in highest summer. As violet’s intensity gradually distills to paler mauvey tones, it will still attract the butterflies and bees and be in total denial of any seasonal change. It seems that all Nature tries to grasp and keep its youth for as long as possible, especially when it realises that even the best of youth has to change.

In Summer, the grass is always greener, but when the sun is at its hottest and most life-giving, we yearn for the shade. Those enchanted hidden woods by oldest streams become our dream. Walking through that land, and being guided by the water, the story of ourselves becomes visible as river and wood make their exit to the sea.

Follow that water out of the woods, over the rocks and into the sand. As the tides part the rocks, salty flowers and gentle floating hairlines of seaweed waving gently on shorelines and rock pools, are but a few metres away from their own evolutions through the swirlings of acrid salt, light and time. These resulting structures which form Nature’s novel “Endeavours of Algaeic to Algebriac”, now sit in less than a few metres from each other, yet countless millions of years apart.

Such a constant exposed clamber it was through solar wind, rain, sun and storm before reaching the patient guard of higher rocks and clifftop soil. Before our saltless green grass grew up on “Jerusalem” hills, their feet in ancient time, dragged and pushed their identities as the lowliest harsh thorns and flattest lichen. As such, long, long before they could reach that silent watching place of Walter de la Mare’s “forest’s ferny floor”, they were forced to be cruelly wretched. Martyred before a green still peace could be possible, Flora’s evolution required pilgrims of chlorophyll just trying to find some solace on upper ground.

Up on the cliffs, a strange coastal ‘eidelweiss looking’ dry flower in the C21st summer comes equipped with mathematical precision in its central dial. Growing alongside its crisp clean dry creaminess, the business of wild, blackest juniper berries in small bushes and then just below, the impartial rock yellow succulents, neither water plant or hill grass.

The whole scene becomes a triumph of summer coastline. I can touch it now. Watch the sea go out, watch the sea come in. In the passing of an afternoon, just there in the sunshine, with a few hours a-wandering, the world can be summed up for much much more than a few moments in passing. Rising to the top of the cliff is now a land. Green perfection. Memories are made of this.

It was a drab afternoon in the vase of Life and facing the very blandest of walls, even the former brightness of the floral ballerina in her perfect once vibrant, sunset salmon pink tutu could not resist the dullness of a rainwash of an ageing summer’s day. But now sadly fading, what was there to do? Feel the approach of truth and time; await the rising of the evening electric light, listen to the wall and reflect with the company of one’s shadows.

It could be a very fine dance if one let it. Even Margot Fonteyn danced Romeo’s Juliet in her late 50s. Just because of a seasonless and blueless day, just because of continued English rain and overhanging coolness, despondency did not have to take hold. She would with grace, gradually assume her new form, but enjoy her fully petalled memories with relish and gratitude. And with herself and with her imaginary ” once-loved” brought back to life from the high summer days of mid July, and who shared the same vase, rather than play the tragic heroine of the ill fated romance, the future would instead, be set for hope and amends with the past. Summer did have to move on, there will be no resistance as Autumn will begin to feel its way from tonight.

The musical choice, the Holst’s Venus, Bringer of Peace, London Symphony Orchestra. Delicate and joyful as all gladioli are.

High summer always brings the fervour of ideas, enthusiasm and hope to a peak of adventure. In our world of cabled communication, and with our increasing cleverness and ambitious quest to explore 100 million solar systems for “other life” and more besides, the rest of us may marvel at one man’s bequest of $100 million for the task and how it can access research into those 100 million solar systems for hopeful future ‘visitations’.

On such a generous scale of sponsorship, it is the human buying signal rather than an extra-terrestrial ‘bleep’, which can generate significant primeval emotions to stir with speed and rise from the deep within the human core. Such excitement accomplished an instant high fever pitch across the global press. If ever on the journey for earthly truths, we can certainly reach anybody across the planet and instantly with the twittering of gossip and the promise of money.

The purpose of that pledge is to create action on the road to “all important” self discovery. News of such a far reaching experiment will have surpassed over most of our global population of almost 7bn, and we live in the Age of the New Renaissance, who knows what lies ahead? Possibly Nature.

Passiflora lands this summer

During all this commotion, on the surface of planet Earth in the balmy British summer, Flora’s bounty continues to flourish. Like the global press, Nature can be uncontrollably rampant and in the very same week as the Stephen Hawking announcement, one of Flora’s most ardent summer explorers, the passiflora, began to blossom.

A clambering army of passionflower vines could have been deliberately designed for the task of outer worldly communication. With its own type strange and exotic type of beauty, as these individual flowers grow to maturity, they each contain their own space discovery centres. When they flower, passionflowers only respond to the most intense of cosmic rays. As they open, myriads of botanic observatories hosting their own variety of exotic radio telescopes, will investigate the complexities of Nature’s astrophysics, angling themselves for full reach of the sun’s signals. Not just a species of bizarrely beautiful little faces, these starry-eyed floral ‘creatures’ come fully packaged with their own wiring and are ready to unfurl and connect on demand within the daily spin around our solar system at the drop of a sun’s ray.

During the eons of many a Sunday afternoon snooze, it would appear that such flora have developed the fine art of communicating “aliens” for free. They take their science from the sun and have perfected the craft of ‘light response’ through Time itself. From Greece to Japan, passiflora are also known as the ‘clock flower’,

New World history, Old World culture

Long before the Space Age, in a very different evolution of exploration and discovery, after Christopher Columbus had discovered the Americas, the New World provided the fascination with an almost unlimitless range of new botany. Whilst there were in existence some 15 or so Old World passionflowers, in eve of the New World just one new flora to satisfy the appetite of the senses could justify the budget of many journeys of high risk across seas and jungle. Passifloraceae revealed dozens more and now we know of over 530 known species.

Passiflora’s spiritual passage

Through the centuries, passiflora became a powerful and sacred symbol, embued multifarious meaning across the continents. Its peculiar form lent itself to many religious interpretations. Its very name comes from Christianity, symbolising the Passion of Christ, passion being the most profound of spiritual love. For the Christians, its 72 central filaments represented the crown of thorns, 10 petals for the most faithful disciples, whilst its centre was seen as the cross of the crucifixion, but also the chalice of the Holy Grail.

In the old New World, the ancient civilizations of the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs, the sun was the centre of their worship. The passionflower’s sun like radial centre, contributed to the rich mythology of a plant also known as the ‘Vine of Souls’, where inside a shrinking petal hub as it develops an enlarging orange fruit, it also houses the spirits.

For North native American Indians, the beauty of the passionflower was always the most prized, whilst in Asia’s India, again the structure of the flower also has many divine meanings, with the colour blue being especially auspicious as the colour of spirituality and associated with Krishna.

A most modern explorer

It would seem that at least in this world, through our many religions and cultures, the passiflora has been communicating with us all the long from our old worlds to new philosophies. Now in the age of solar science and blessed with an evolution of a DNA with rich diversity, gifts of colour, pharmacy and food, what will the New Age passionflower possibly bring us next? It is a most willing and avid explorer.

With its own natural telescope, if we are perceptive enough, as our flora contains knowledge built up slowly and deliberately, over millions of years, if we did happen to be the only detectable real “life”, which communicates with a vast and amazing history and range of experiences and wonders, might our plants be able detect the subtleties of the universal and solar unknowns which the human connective tissue cannot? We already look to them to do so. How will Flora unravel the secrets of our solar futures? Plants have inspired the human spirit, been responsible for human survival and evolutionary theory suggests that human life is also derived from plants as well.

In a month’s passing, a 10 year journey had stretched our sights to Heaven’s Plutonic surfaces, followed by a well publicised $100 million pledge to invest our imagination to find other “life”. Meanwhile, here, right here, on Earth, in England, the end days of July peaked the summer with driest heat. When summer is fiercest, it lands the largest bloom, in cleanest white, with the most seductive curves, and by far, the most mystical and long distance fragrance. Such is the mystery of the invisible when you have it just in front of you.

July dissipated into a damp and humid August, but life and death live a parallel universe. On this tree, they pass each other, even on the same days with the fullest volume. Like the Chinese yin and yang of universal truth, the small becomes full, and the full becomes empty.

Magnolia grandiflora. Loved across the continents where fossils from 20 million years have been found and the Magnoliaceae species apparently began 95 million years ago. Now that’s a journey.

Tonight

It took just a few very unsure, apprehensive minutes to another unknown destination. Not knowing why we follow a trail, but when we do, that few minutes can be the start of a strange journey, with the most rewarding of realisations.

To follow the trail…….

9.30pm. Take the soft footsteps from the dropping poppies across the path, to the worn pine needles of the falling giant at the end of the street. Round their corner, where the monkey puzzle tree lives, veer left around the bend,
Look right, look left and right again to the white birch on the green patch. Then look up.

Remember, there was a breeze, but the clouds did not move and you could not work out why. If a motionless sky could be prepared for Constable to paint it, this will be it.

Permission to be amazed is only ever a temporary grant, but it can happen many times, and then the reason why the clouds did not move whilst the air definitely did waft above your skin and brush with the trees, will begin to appear.

Because around that road bend, there is another curvature. A generously sized crescent moon makes a double entrance, once, a grand appearance when you least expected it, but twice because it was always there. Straight ahead, centre street, balanced above the trees, it hangs. All one has to do is to turn that corner to see it. A glorious luminesce underlined with an intense watery signature of a thunderous deep, smoky blue cloudband. This will be stretching its might across the horizon, some 240,000 miles below.

But In microseconds, the great universe is on the move again. Is that La Luna cutting down through the clouds as a great laser scythe with precision and purpose in surgery, or is it the clouds rising to serve as a cloak to provide rest, protection and secrecy for this enchanting host? No one will ever be sure of where the fine boundaries of “what is” and “maybe”, starts and finishes. In the blink of a light second, that once mighty river of cloud will have slipped its guise without notice and into a vapoury and spidery nebula, revealing the moon to become clearly visible once again.

The illusion of encroaching darkness is that it makes the brightness of light more intense, yet it is darkness that will provide the most surprising revelations. In the universe’s own time, a crescent journey of half-light is able to illumine a trio of seasons in one night, where autumnal mountain ash and wintry holly now appear in the same solar breath as summer fuchsia.

Only with such a liquid light and on an airy evening, do Autumn and Winter dare emerge with their outlined, but defined presence on the edge of Summer, but in the vacuum of impossibility, through a curve in one night of the universe, there are those dual moments when everything makes sense and nothing really matters, and nothing makes sense and everything matters.

Prehistory’s future.
The primeval lily of willow woods,
A climber rising from darkened forests,
Ambitious to see the sun, but always yearning shade.

Papery petals in white
With cool smooth touch,
Romantic, aspiring to feel the waxing moon
But shy, scentless, skinny, with appearance of complicity

The doomed bloom
Remained unchanged. An eternity of primitive simplicity.
With its white face softer than light in High Summer duskings
It brings the day’s end with a glowing translucence and backlit canvas.

A screen of shadow play.
Transparent truth and illuminations
Stirring shadows of nearby neighbours,
Infatuated with self, they send an echo of love to stir the stamen’s trust.

But modern branches bend and crack;
Under the subtle watch of the crawling vine
A china sky will fragment between the spinal twists of wood,
As Convolvulus Cneorum imprints its memories of forsaken eons with no regret.